A scalable, secure, and performant environment

THEIR CHALLENGE

Changing how travel businesses operate in a digital era

TUI Musement is the Tours & Activities division of TUI Group, the world’s leading integrated tourism business. TUI Musement delivers the experiences, transfers and service that make a holiday. It also acts as an innovation hub for TUI Group, where providing a truly customer-centric experience means successfully implementing and delivering digital transformation.

“TUI Musement has four main operational pillars: customer-centricity, platforming, AI-first and data, and operational excellence,” said Muhammad Ali Khan, Group Head of Technology at TUI Musement. “Our aim is to provide the digital solutions that deliver the best service that customers want and expect from a company like TUI.”

Specifically, this means transitioning from traditional business models to interactive digital platforms, while meeting rapidly changing customer expectations. For TUI, delivering a customer-centric solution that recognizes their likes and dislikes involves hyper-personalized processes and instant response times.

“When we talk about a travel company in the context of digital transformation, it’s not just about the systems and the solutions, it’s about the business models as well,” Khan explained. “Digital transformation is changing how businesses like ours work and operate in the digital era.”

It also means delivering seamless experiences and moving away from previous inefficiencies and slow planning. Doing so effectively means establishing a fast, effective, responsive and powerful foundation.

“TUI Musement has always been agile and open to new ways of doing things,” said Khan. “In 2017 SQL databases were standard for travel companies, but we launched a major project to enhance our operational capability to benefit both us and the customer. Those technological choices need to be very solid, which is where MongoDB came into the picture.”

OUR SOLUTION

Modernizing infrastructure to drive innovation

Adopting MongoDB meant TUI Musement could move away from the rigid—and increasingly costly—SQL database environment and adopt a document-based solution that was an ideal match for its requirements.

“MongoDB is based on document format technology, such as JSON. It is easier to use, and if you want to change multiple documents at the same time, it helps you to do it, whereas SQL won’t; it is very rigid,” said Khan. “And then when MongoDB Atlas came in, suddenly it’s very scalable because you can deploy it in the cloud. We partner with AWS, which allowed us to bring MongoDB Atlas in very quickly.”

TUI Musement immediately saw that MongoDB provided the data environment it needed, delivering flexibility, scalability, performance and security.

“MongoDB Atlas is a complete, out-of-the-box solution,” said Khan. “Features like MongoDB Atlas Search are ready to go, and the cognitive load on both our data teams and developers is much, much lower.”

And as TUI Musement’s implementation of MongoDB evolved, so did the breadth of capabilities that it began to use. MongoDB’s Voyage solution now handles embedding tasks that streamline vector storage and searches, and is also playing a key role in enabling TUI Musement’s use of large language models (LLMs), which enable TUI Musement to efficiently retrieve context and provide relevant, personalized travel recommendations in real time.

“The more effectively you embed, the more you can push semantic searches, for example,” Kahn added. “Customers are moving away from traditional search methods and want to use natural language— ‘I want to go to Mexico. Tell me what I can do there.’ That’s where the technology is so important, and why MongoDB Atlas is such a solid foundation.”

OUTCOME

Delivering operational excellence and efficiency

“With MongoDB Atlas, TUI Musement can now focus on delivering solutions instead of developing and managing them,” said Khan. It’s a critical step forward, and one that Khan sees as fundamental to TUI Musement’s future.

“Developers don’t need to worry about the pipelines or connecting different technical components,” Khan said. “They can just build the solutions and roll them out to our customers. And MongoDB Atlas helps us to do that much faster.”

MongoDB Atlas has played a key role in TUI Musement’s ability to cut planning experiences from 72 hours to just a few minutes. It has also enhanced its search performance, providing customers with millisecond-level speed and reliability in searching for and booking experiences and transfers. It’s a critical competitive differentiator that Khan is eager to develop even further.

“TUI Musement served 15 million customers just last year, and sold over 10 million excursions and 30 million transfers, which is the strongest evidence that customers are happy with us,” Khan noted. “That’s where MongoDB Atlas also comes in; we are providing the solution they need today, not yesterday.”

Importantly, as the industry embraces AI and its rapid evolution, TUI Musement has the underlying infrastructure in place that will allow it to take the lead in harnessing the new opportunities and delivering them to customers.

“MongoDB Atlas is the silver bullet,” said Khan. “It’s a solution for your database, your search, and now it’s providing AI tools. It’s taken us beyond operational transformation to a solution that we’re rolling out everywhere.”

MongoDB Atlas is supporting TUI Musement’s goals of operational excellence and efficiency, delivering a scalable, secure, and high-performing environment that improves response times, automates processes, and streamlines workflows. It’s also giving TUI the foundation it needs to deliver an outstanding digital customer experience that will ensure success for years to come.

“Your base needs to be right, and for us that means the database,” Khan said. “How you deal with your data, how and where you store it, how you access it and how often—this is all relevant when implementing, for example, agentic AI or whatever comes next to the market. Get the foundation right first, and that means choosing the best solution on the market. And for us, that’s MongoDB Atlas.”